Arts and Entertainment
Best Visual Artist
Jon Routson
In the past year local artist Jon Routson has received the sort of press attention for which some artists would kill. His works have triggered intriguing discussion in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Film Comment, and this paper, and if the praise reads a bit conflicted it’s because his work raises such curious authorship issues in an art marketplace in which creativity is copyright protected. Routson makes movie bootlegs, sneaking his mini digital-video camera into multiplex theaters, pointing them at the screen, pressing record, and then projecting the skewed, low-grade results against his representative Team Gallery’s walls in Chelsea. His Recordings II spring show included three separate bootlegs of The Passion of the Christ projected as a triptych that slyly demystified the controversial patina enveloping seeing the movie and focused, nonjudgmentally, on what and how Passion tells its story. Routson himself isn’t sure where, if anywhere, this work is leading him, but we’d like to tip our hat to a blithe mind unafraid of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
Other Awards for Best Visual Artist:
Jeffrey Kent, 9/17/2008
Erin Womack, 9/19/2007
Larry Scott, 9/21/2005
